It's scary to find out that your headache is actually a rare avian disease that only effects a small number of African villagers. (Image: iStock)

No, that weird rash you have isn't lupus.

We've all done it – you wake up one morning with a weird rash and after spending five minutes online, you're shocked to find out you have a complex cocktail of leprosy, gluten intolerance and potentially a dash of bird flu.

Machine based doctors – like the all-powerful Dr Google – can be pretty good, but new research from Harvard Medical School says that you still can’t beat a face-to-face visit with a real, breathing doc.

Armed with a fistful of the most common apps people use to diagnose their maladies, a team of researchers set out to analyse just how accurate they were compared to going to the doctors.

You may think that the apps wouldn’t have a hope in the world of beating a health professional, but it’s important to remember that physicians do make errors roughly 10 to 15 percent of the time.

To set their experiment, the researchers came up with 45 clinical cases which varied in quirkiness and commonness from a case of the sniffles to all sorts of mis-aligned symptoms that would fool even Dr. House (it's always lupus, trust me).

They then presented these hypothetical cases to 234 physicians who were asked to give what they thought was the most likely diagnosis for each patient.

Symptoms of those same cases were also punched in to the top 23 most-used symptom-checking apps available for your smartphone.

The results of the experiment were enough to make any med school professor sigh in relief: the physicians far out-performed the apps, picking the correct diagnosis 72 percent of the time, compared to just 34 percent for the DIY symptom checkers.

Where the doctors comprehensively beat the computers was when the symptoms presented a particularly unusual or uncommon illness, thanks largely to their large degree of clinical experience.

According to senior investigator of the study Dr Ateev Mehrotra, this study strikes up a firm win for the human doctors – but that doesn’t mean the intelligence of computerised physicians won't get better.

"While the computer programs were clearly inferior to physicians in terms of diagnostic accuracy, it will be critical to study future generations of computer programs that may be more accurate," said Dr Mehrotra.

"Clinical diagnosis is currently as much art as it is science, but there is great promise for technology to help augment clinical diagnoses."

Despite the study's findings, it's unlikely to put a dent in the sheer amount of people who Google their symptoms before heading to their local GP.

So rampant is this practice that experts have termed a new kind of patient who frets over what they read on the internet: it’s called having "cyberchondria".

Recent research from Queensland University of Technology has found that people with cyberchondria are likely to have increased anxiety, stress levels and insomnia as they search for a web page that confirms what they've already diagnosed themselves with in their mind.